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> No one ever talks about paper bags. Growing up that's all we ever used and it was easily biodegradable. But stores went with the cheaper solution.

Plastic Bags were banned here in Germany (Maybe EU?) so now you can get either Paper Bags or Plastic Bags made from recycled plastic water bottles. To be quite honest: The paper bags suck because they are fragile and the recycled bags are expensive.

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I think it's working as intended. It incentivises buying a good quality plastics or cloth bag and reuse.

Cloth bags are problematic. The Danish EPA put the break-even on cotton bags at 7,100 re-uses (or 20,000 for organic)[1].

Most people won’t shop enough in their life to pay back that organic cotton bag - reusing twice a week, it will take you 200 years before you break even.

1: https://www2.mst.dk/udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-... - see section 6.3 for reuse numbers

It depends on the paper. Some takeaways round here seem to come in very robust paper bags, although takeaway is perhaps not as challenging as a full bag of groceries.

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